


The Sincerest Form of Flattery

by Sanguineheroine



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: All Gregson Wanted Was to Finish His Pie, Crack, Drug Use, Kink Meme, Lestrade's on to Something, M/M, Slash, Taking The Back Stairs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-28
Updated: 2014-06-28
Packaged: 2018-02-06 13:27:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1859691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanguineheroine/pseuds/Sanguineheroine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lestrade is searching for the secret of Sherlock Holmes' success.  He learns, as we all do, that the most important thing in this life is to be yourself.  Because you can't be Sherlock Holmes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sincerest Form of Flattery

**MARCH**

“You look right done in, Sir,” Gregson said, setting down his teacup with a clatter. Lestrade just glared at him through red eyes and took another mouthful of coffee.

“If it’s good enough for Holmes, it’s good enough for me,” he replied shortly, sitting up a little straighter and running a hand through his hair. As if in sympathy, it also stood up straight and Gregson choked out a lungful of smoke. “Problem, Gregson?” The Inspector inquired stroppily.

“None to speak of, Sir,” Gregson mumbled as he took up his notebook and turned for the door.

“Where are you going, man?” Lestrade demanded, dropping his coffee cup into the paper bin and placing his pen carefully into the sugar bowl, “We’ve got work ahead of us; witnesses to question and whatnot, I’m certain of it.”

“I’m going home, Sir,” Gregson said slowly, “the missus gets awful riled when I miss supper.” He looked pointedly at Lestrade’s shoes, which were both mismatched and untied, “You might think of doing the same,” he added gently as the Inspector attempted to button his inside-out overcoat.

“Nonsense, Detective,” Lestrade proclaimed loudly, sitting back down at his desk and defiantly dipping a teaspoon into his inkwell, “I’m fine; plenty of good hours left in my day.”

When Gregson turned back to say goodnight, Lestrade was already asleep; slumped over his papers, oblivious to the creeping tide of coffee soon to engulf his left shoe. Gregson did not wake him.

 

**APRIL**

“Clarkie’s off to the pie shop, Sir,” Gregson called through the open front door, “what do you fancy?”

“Nothing for me, Detective,” Lestrade answered primly from the sitting room, where he was in conference with Mr Holmes and Doctor Watson. If ‘conference’ could be said to mean ‘smoking a cigar while Mr Holmes crawled around under the settee’, which Gregson supposed that in some parts of the world, it could be.

Twenty minutes and a half a good beef pie later, there came a tremendous echoing thud from inside the house. The deceased gentleman’s maid appeared in the doorway a minute later, calling frantically for ‘Mr Gregstone’. With one last regretful look at his pie, Gregson handed it off to Clarkie and strode into the foyer.

“In here, Detective,” Doctor Watson’s calm summons came, rather unexpectedly, from the oriental rug under the breakfast table. He was crouched there over Inspector Lestrade’s insensate form, a cigar still in one hand and the business end of a stethoscope in the other. Mr Holmes was nowhere to be seen.

“Has he been well to-day, Detective?” The Doctor inquired with a vague gesture at the Inspector’s person. “Not ill, or faint?”

“I don’t know rightly, Doctor, but he didn’t take breakfast or lunch,” Gregson offered, feeling a mite uncomfortable discussing Lestrade’s gastronomical peculiarities right over the top of his head, whether it was at shoulder height (as was usual) or ankle height (as it was now).

“Hmm,” Doctor Watson said thoughtfully, handing his cigar up to Mr Holmes, who had appeared silently over the Doctor’s shoulder. Mr Holmes tapped the ash absently into Lestrade’s upturned bowler and took a pensive puff before passing the cigar back.

“Friend Lestrade does not appear at all well, Watson,” Holmes observed, leaning down to exhale a wreath of blue smoke around the Inspector’s head, “do you suppose it might be terminal?”

“I suppose nothing, Holmes,” Doctor Watson said irritably, while pushing his stethoscope up to the brim of his hat. He opened a jar of salts and held it over the Inspector, “other than the fact that you are a nuisance, and quite extraneous to these proceedings. Should you not be deducing something of great import?”

Mr Holmes seemed to consider that for a long moment.

“I deduce,” he began, “that the Inspector has not been taking regular meals. His waistcoat is loose and he has the most tremendous shadows beneath his eyes. When you consider those facts in conjunction with his complexion, which appears, if it is at all possible, even more jaundiced than is usual for a policeman, you can come to the sensible conclusion that Scotland Yard is underpaying its officers. Do you agree, Detective Gregson?”

Gregson looked blankly at Mr Holmes, who was now standing uncomfortably close to his right ear. “I couldn’t say, Mr Holmes,” he managed finally, leaning as far from the Detective as he could manage without toppling over. There had been more than enough toppling police for one day.

“Ah,” Mr Holmes whispered stagily, laying a finger alongside his nose, “say no more, good Gregson.”

It was at that moment that Inspector Lestrade announced his return to wakefulness by vomiting on the Doctor’s trousers.

 

**MAY**

When three days had passed without a sign of Inspector Lestrade, Detective Gregson found himself dispatched to the Inspector’s home to investigate. There was no answer to his bell, and nothing immediately visible from the front windows. Primarily, Gregson supposed, because the curtains were drawn. With a sigh, he pulled a jemmy from his pocket and set to work.

“State your business!” Came the hoarse command. Gregson looked all about him but the sitting room was dark and so there was little to see.

“I am an officer of the law,” he replied nervously, fingering his billy club, “and I wish to enquire as to the whereabouts of one Gabriel Lestrade.” At that, there the sound of a match being struck and the dim light of a single lamp revealed the wreckage of what at one time had been a welcoming, if tastelessly furnished, sitting room.

The settee had been upended and used as a foundation for a towering fortification that took up most of one wall. It was buttressed by kitchen chairs, cushions and a cracked vase in the shape of Venus. The remains of at least one lamp had been formed into a sort of moat at the edge of the settee and they sparkled maliciously in the half-light. Gregson stepped gingerly around them, for the moment unaware that they posed no danger to his heavy boots. The fire irons had been all bent and broken, with the exception of one poker; that was clutched tightly in Lestrade’s grimy left hand, the right was holding the lamp aloft above his oily, wildly disordered hair.

“Inspector, Sir,” Gregson began falteringly, “are you… er, that is… have you… where is the maid?”

Lestrade did not appear to consider it an unusual enquiry. His brow creased for a moment as he considered carefully.

“She left,” he said finally, “said I was mad. I was a bit put out, had to make my own tea,” he gestured to a broken pile of crockery balanced upon an open atlas.

“I understand,” Gregson said slowly, not really sure that he did, “are you? Mad, that is,” he added as an afterthought. He wondered briefly whether it was necessary to ask a man in his drawers, who had built a castle from chairs and served tea upon an atlas, whether he was, indeed, mad. Well, he thought, it is always better to be safe than sorry.

“I think I was,” Lestrade replied thoughtfully, setting the lamp down on the mantle, “but I don’t expect that I shall be for much longer.”

“Perhaps,” Gregson suggested brightly, “you could wait out the madness in the bath, while I make some fresh tea?”

“That is an excellent idea, Sir, genius in fact. They say, you know, that genius is near to madness. Do you suppose that you could be mad?” Lestrade levelled the poker at Gregson and was wagging it time to his speech, which had acquired an off-putting, sing-song quality.

“I suppose I might be,” Gregson countered, “all the more reason for a cuppa, isn’t it?” Lestrade nodded in agreement, and began climbing the stairs. He paused on the landing and turned back, calling in a tired voice

“Gregson, old boy, make sure you use the leaves in the blue jar. I think ones in the brown have gone a little funny.”

 

“Blue jar, indeed,” the Detective muttered as he shuffled about the kitchen, “they’re all bloody blue jars, aren’t they?” And so they were, with the exception of a squat brown chemist’s jar tucked behind the sugar. The smudged label read _Cocaine Solution_. Shaking his head, he tucked it into his coat pocket.

On his way home, he dropped it into an open drain and tried very hard not to think about it again.

 

**JUNE**

“How do you suppose,” he asked Lestrade breathlessly, “this is going to help either of us become better policeman?” Lestrade bit down on Gregson’s bottom lip and tightened his fingers on his hip before replying.

“I’m not entirely certain. Is that important?” The Inspector’s eyes were wide and bright in the light of the lamp. It was, in point of fact, the only lamp to have survived his Cocaine mania, and he often thought of it fondly. So fondly that he had not yet purchased any others.

“I don’t think so,” Gregson groaned as Lestrade unbuttoned his trousers, “but it seems to me more like to criminality than anything.”

“Perhaps,” Lestrade allowed, licking a wet stripe across the Detective’s inner thigh, “but it’s all interconnected, you see,” he explained carefully to the rather engaging ridge of muscle leading from Gregson’s left hip to the base of his prick. “Do you see?” The Inspector enquired politely before he swallowed Gregson down.

Gregson could not begin to understand the logic behind Lestrade’s theory, but the final outcome seemed at this moment to be entirely irrelevant. “Not really,” he groaned, before his eyes slipped closed and speech became an impossibility.

 

“Our friend Lestrade seems much improved,” Holmes remarked quietly to Watson as they walked from the Inspector’s office.

“I dare say he’s finally settled on a less taxing way of emulating you. Perhaps Cocaine?” Watson suggested blandly.

“Perhaps,” Holmes agreed, “but more than likely he has chosen a new role model. Yourself, I would think, having observed his morning repast. Eggs, bacon, toast and _jam_? There can be no doubt about it, dear boy.”

Watson spun on his heel to face Holmes, but before he could construct a defence of his condimentry habits they were interrupted by a cheerfully whistling Detective Gregson.

“Good morning, Gentlemen,” he called as he strolled by. Without missing a phrase, he resumed his whistling. Holmes raised a thoughtful eyebrow, and then smiled to himself.

“Gregson, dear fellow, how is the Inspector fairing? He did seem much more himself today than when last we met.” The Detective turned to face them again, tipping his hat back jauntily before answering.

“Mr Holmes,” Gregson said with a wry smile, “I can honestly say that the Inspector has never felt better.” With a wink, he continued down the hall, leaving behind him a rather bemused Detective and a very confused Doctor.


End file.
